


Resonance

by handschuhmaus



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: A complicated relationship not easily defined
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-01 00:03:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13986150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handschuhmaus/pseuds/handschuhmaus
Summary: Mössbauer spectroscopy is a technique which uses recoiless emission and resonant absorption of gamma rays emitted by certain isotopes to probe the environment around the atomic nucleus. The ray source is driven back and forth to Doppler-shift the gamma ray in order for sample atoms in somewhat different settings (and thus with slightly altered energy levels) to undergo resonant absorption at slightly different wavelengths.N.B. The above summary of a physics topic may contain inaccuracies.





	Resonance

**Author's Note:**

> _Mössbauer spectroscopy is a technique which uses recoiless emission and resonant absorption of gamma rays emitted by certain isotopes to probe the environment around the atomic nucleus. The ray source is driven back and forth to Doppler-shift the gamma ray in order for sample atoms in somewhat different settings (and thus with slightly altered energy levels) to undergo resonant absorption at slightly different wavelengths._
> 
> N.B. The above summary of a physics topic may contain inaccuracies.

Muuns, it seems, are either far more inclined to ...touching than humans, or Hego Damask is unusual for a Muun or perhaps his judgement about these things is simply warped from life under Cosinga Palpatine's petty and vindictive rule.

He could probably bear the feelings better, if it weren't for the touching.

(Of course, the other possibility is that Damask has feelings for him, which is ...a complicated prospect. Beyond observing that a few girls were pretty, he hasn't had any experience with anything aimed at intimate adult relationships. Cosinga hadn't liked that, but in his experience, the man would have found some complaint no matter what he did, so that in itself wasn't indicative of anything. ...however, much older men were also a category of people who generally tended to remind him of Cosinga, and that is not an association he desires to have here. But it seems inescapable.)

* * *

The thought echoes a little, in the Force. Plagueis doesn't have the details, not at this point in their association, only something about his being...handsy.

It's true. The small young human is a mess of soft skin and soft, compellingly orange hair and yet awkward limbs, and the subtle presence he has in the Force, perhaps so long silenced, is beautifully feral. 

If he were even inclined to think about it, Plagueis would readily admit that he is not very good at thinking of people as ...something besides objects. His apprentice isn't excluded from that, and yet he is something that the Muun desperately wishes to possess, and the constant laying on of hands is attributable to yet another layer of thoughts about the human. Some kind of wonder that he gets to associate with such a curious Force-user.

He does suppose both that to some people possession probably would constitute a sexual claiming, and that the touching might imply such a desire in some perspectives. 

But...for all that he has become utterly inured to blood (aside from how charming a liquid it is biologically speaking) he has never felt a need to have that sort of possession.

Perhaps things _are_ changed now, and yet--he is squeamish about such business; they are base desires so commonly indulged, so seldom conquered, and not one that he thinks he really feels now.

He feels oddly ...reverent, honestly, despite the manifest imperfections in the boy before him, and all the things he actually says to him. For Plagueis has never been good at being worshipful, without the will to conquer and dissect and twist the magnificent to his own purposes overtaking all else.

* * *

Sidious really isn't ready to analyse the fact that he is having some kind of inconvenient feelings for Plagueis. There is some school of thought that insists that all relationships are bound up with those one has with one's parents, and certainly the fact that he could expect the relationship with Damask to parallel (but hopefully be better than) his with Cosinga casts shadows over the whole thing, but that's not all of it.

He is vaguely aware of the phenomenon of hero worship, with regard to young women falling for authority figures. This, he judges, is the best approximation of what he is apparently susceptible to here, and yet--it isn't easy to discard as that ought to be.

Damask, to put it bluntly, is his savior, from four more years of hell under Cosinga and frankly a future beyond that likely still involuntarily dominated by the vile man, who would insinuate himself in all family matters. But he is not a kind savior (not that Palpatine deserves that), and the young man he has coaxed into crafting a disaster from which he then extricated him is not kind either. Is _heartless, ambitious, arrogant_ , the sort of person good people have no use for.

But Damask is like that, too. Sharp-edged, double-sided, bearing no man's rule over his own life. Furthermore, he knows intimately that monstrous Force which Palpatine is able to channel to destruction. That storm that is always looming, half within him, half without. 

They are thus more intimate and more understanding than ever he has had before, and perhaps then it is natural, only human (of whatever human still remains in the person of a patricidal murderer) that he wants... more, wants the touches he was denied as Cosinga's son, wants the Muun to both talk and listen to him.

Yet, it is surely unlikely that that is what Damask actually wants--if Plagueis wants more from him than his role as a tool, it is more than likely a brutal parody of intimacy and possession... It is plain that his new master does not hesitate at every other misuse and verbal and physical harm--why would it be that he should care to father--in a far more proper sense than Cosinga--his apprentice, when there was the possibility of... physically claiming him, perverting the oft sacred so-called act of love?

He is like him in that he would profane their social institutions, and yet--that, naturally, is a step farther than he wants to go.

This line of thought does not answer the question, if it really is a question, of why Damask touches him so much. Nor does it give him any solution to the question of how to deal with his own side of these inconvenient feelings.

But it does make plain that they seem natural in another way--Damask and he are, so to speak, on similar wavelengths, attuned to the same sort of attitudes, ones worlds away from Cosinga's.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know if I'll continue this...?
> 
> ~~while this ambiguously mentions and leaves the possibility, for various reasons I haven't really enjoyed the outright casting of this relationship as sexual, so...~~
> 
> The song for this one is OTR's "Within Without", specifically from "Then there is your flare..." and especially the "sympathetic vibration" bit.


End file.
